Saul Steinberg is one of my favorite cartoonists of all time. Tonight I found this 1949 first edition of his second book, THE ART OF LIVING, in a Half Price Books for $12. (See my other posts on Steinberg.)

Dig the line work:

The use of collage:

The counterfeit handwriting:

The music notation paper:

Terrific stuff. On cartoonist Mike Lynch’s blog, you can see some great scans of Steinberg’s first book, ALL IN A LINE.

Friday, 5PM EST is the deadline for the August Newspaper Blackout Poems contest. You could win publication and a free book! What the heck are you waiting for?

I don’t know whether my husband is a genius or not, but he certainly has a dirty mind.— Nora Barnacle on James Joyce

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come….I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.— Sigmund Freud, 1884, in a letter to his fiancee, Martha

…when one draws from direct observation, one is choosing what to leave in, what to leave out and even reconstructing elements so that the drawing will “read” better. When one draws from a photograph, the space is flattened, the camera has already selected the lines, shapes, and forms for you. When you are outside drawing a tree, YOU are choosing what is in focus, what is not—there is an exchange between subject and viewer. That is the art.— Frank Santoro

Drawn on the back porch of Bouldin Creek coffeehouse while drinking a $2 beer.

So you’ve left your newspapers and book stuff at home, you need to take some notes, and all I you have is this week’s New Yorker, which your wife hasn’t read yet.

What do you do?

Whip out your Sharpie and defile the “Goings On About The Town.” (No one wants to read about all the great stuff they’re missing by living outside of Manhattan anyways.)

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1. Figure out what’s worth stealing
2. Move on to the next thing

Rinse and repeat.

From a New Yorker article about the French serial imposter Frédéric Bourdin (nicknamed “The Chameleon”):

…he tried to elevate his criminality into an “art.” First, he said, he conceived of…whom he wanted to play. Then he gradually mapped out the character’s biography, from his heritage to his family to his tics. “The key is actually not lying about everything,” Bourdin said. “Otherwise, you’ll just mix things up.” He said that he adhered to maxims such as “Keep it simple” and “A good liar uses the truth.” In choosing a name, he preferred one that carried a deep association in his memory….He compared what he did to being a spy: you changed superficial details while keeping your core intact.

This, too, is what the writer does…

Here’s a mind map of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game:

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Something I didn’t explore in the map was the idea of gifted children vs. gifted adults.

The main character in Moneyball is Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Billy Beane started out as an unbelievably gifted young athlete–he could do anything on almost any playing field. He succeeded at everything. He was a scout’s wet dream, and ended up getting drafted right out of high school into the major leagues.

And then Billy’s troubles began.

If there was one thing Billy was not equipped for, it was failure….He didn’t know how to think of himself if he couldn’t think of himself as a success….The moment Billy failed, he went looking for something to break.

Despite his tremendous physical abilities, his inability to mentally deal with his failures is what separated him from the successful players he sat next to on the bench, like Lenny Dykstra:

Physically, Lenny didn’t belong in the same league with him. He was half Billy’s size and had a fraction of Billy’s promise – which is why the Mets hadn’t drafted him until the 13th round. Mentally, Lenny was superior, which was odd, considering Lenny wasn’t what you’d call a student of the game. Billy remembers sitting with Lenny in a Mets dugout watching the opposing pitcher warm up. ‘Lenny says, “So who’s that big dumb ass out there on the hill?” And I say, “Lenny, you’re kidding me, right? That’s Steve Carlton. He’s maybe the greatest left-hander in the history of the game.” Lenny says, “Oh, yeah! I knew that!” He sits there for a minute and says, “So, what’s he got?” And I say, “Lenny, come on. Steve Carlton. He’s got heat and also maybe the nastiest slider ever.” And Lenny sits there for a while longer as if he’s taking that in. Finally he just says, “Shit, I’ll stick him.” I’m sitting there thinking, that’s a magazine cover out there on the hill and all Lenny can think is that he’ll stick him.’”

The point about Lenny, at least to Billy, was clear: Lenny didn’t let his mind screw him up. The physical gifts required to play pro ball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. “Lenny was so perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball,” said Billy. “He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. And he had no idea where he was. And I was the opposite.”

As J.K. Rowling said in her address to Harvard, the ability to overcome failure might be the important ingredient in successfully transitioning into adulthood.

Eventually, Beane went on to be one of the most successful managers in baseball. How? He learned from his failure, and started looking for young players the opposite of him!

So, as Sam Beckett said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Be unafraid!

(For real reviews of the book, see Mark Larson and Tim Walker. Tim also has a great post on the benefits of failure.)

Trying hard to solve that impossible problem? Hit the topless bar, take a warm shower, and sleep on it.

Three tips I gathered from Jonah Lehrer’s great article in the July 28th New Yorker called “The Eureka Hunt,” all about “insight,” where our good ideas come from, when they come to us, and why.

The formula:

total immersion → relaxing distraction = moment of insight

The insight process…is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focussed, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. “The relaxation phase is crucial,” Jung-Beeman said. “That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers.” Another ideal moment for insights, according to the scientists, is the early morning, right after we wake up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active. Jung-Beeman said, “The problem with the morning, though, is that we’re always so rushed. We’ve got to get the kids ready for school, so we leap out of bed and never give ourselves a chance to think.” He recommends that if we’re stuck on a difficult problem, it’s better to set the alarm clock a few minutes early so that we have time to lie in bed and ruminate. We do some of our best thinking while we’re still half asleep.

The mathematician Henri Poincaré had his “seminal insight into non-Euclidean geometry…while he was boarding a bus.”

Poincaré insisted that the best way to think about complex problems is to immerse yourself in the problem until you hit an impasse. Then, when it seems that “nothing good has been accomplished,” you should find a way to distract yourself, preferably by going on a “walk or a journey”. The answer will arrive when you least expect it.

And let’s not forget Richard Feynman:

the Nobel Prize winning physicist, preferred the relaxed atmosphere of a topless bar, where he would sip 7UP, “watch the entertainment,” and, if inspiration struck, scribble equations on cocktail napkins.

The good stuff comes along when you’re not forcing it—what Lynda Barry and Donald Barthelme call “not-knowing.”

My “Eureka!” moments always come to me in the shower, which is why I keep a dry-erase marker in the bathroom.

When do y’all get your best ideas?

Enter the contest and you could win a free copy of the book and be published!

Read the official contest rules.

Get out your markers: this is the first of four monthly contests we’ll be running for the rest of the year. For each monthly contest, one winner and three runners-up will receive a free copy of the book, along with the chance to be published in the book!

To enter the contest, you must be 18 and a US resident (sorry to all you young’uns and overseas folk!) One entry per monthly contest.

The two columns of newspaper below are from August 1, 1908, 100 years ago. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to turn them into a poem.

[download high-quality GIF image] | [download PDF]

Directions

You can go about the creation of your poem in one of two ways:

WITH MARKER FUMES

1. Download the PDF and print it out (you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader)
2. Black out the words in the newspaper text into a poem
3. Scan or take a digital picture of the poem. Be sure it’s readable.
4. Save an image of the poem as a .jpg, .gif, or .png file less than 2MB in file size
5. Send in the file along with the required information using the submission form

WITHOUT MARKER FUMES

1. Download the high-quality GIF and save it to your desktop (right-click save as on the link)
2. Open the GIF with an image-editing program like Paint or Photoshop
3. Black out the words in the newspaper text into a poem
4. Save an image of the poem as a .jpg, .gif, or .png file less than 2MB in file size
5. Send in the image file along with the required information using the submission form

TIPS

• Remember that Westerners read left-to-right, up-to-down. Poems read best if they follow that pattern.
• You can get around the left/right/up/down problem by connecting words with whitespace. (See an example.)
• What you are doing when making a blackout poem, in the words of Allen Ginsberg, is “shopping for images.” Nouns and verbs make the best images.
• Regardless of where it’s located in the text, I always start a poem by looking for a word or image that resonates with me and move from there.
• It’s a lot like a word search.
• You don’t have to use the whole text. What to leave in / leave out / how long is the magic.
• Poetry doesn’t have to be serious!
• Try not to think to hard about it and let it flow! It might take you a bunch of tries. Don’t be intimidated! Anyone can do it!

One winner and three runners-up will be announced at the end of the month, along with a new contest in September.

Help us spread the word! Link to:
http://www.austinkleon.com/newspaper-blackout-poems

Good luck!

Submission form

Read the official contest rules.

Remember: only US residents 18 and older. One contest entry per month, please. Be sure to fill out all required fields and keep your image file limited to 2MB or smaller.

All entries must be submitted by August 22, 2008 (5:00 PM EST)

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Problems with your submission? E-mail: blackoutpoems [at] gmail [dot] com

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Just got back from the third Vizthink Austin meetup. Daniel Saltzman of Enspire Learning gave a terrific presentation on visual metaphor. An excellent subject, as one of the most important and helpful bits I’ve learned about drawing and writing is that all marks on paper are metaphors.

Some equations:

• the unknown <– metaphor –> the known = learning
• love ≠ mediocrity

His steps to using visual metaphor in a design setting:

1. Start with the content
2. Find the emotion
3. Consider your audience

Saltzman talked a lot about using metaphors from nature, and so I asked about clichés—whether they were good or bad. His answer impressed me: “when you’re short on time, use clichés.”

(And Kay Ryan popped into my head—”Poets rehabilitate clichés.”)

At the last meeting, I mentioned that visual thinking is nothing new: it’s a forgotten art, something we have to rediscover:

Tonight Saltzman said the same thing: This is not something new, this is a return.

Also: something weird happened while I was drawing—the first thing I drew on my notebook was the awful Austin traffic I had to sit through to get to the meeting…as I drew (roughly) counterclockwise, towards the end, I made a note about giving users the illusion of freedom by allowing them to move through space within a linear narrative (Saltzman was showing us an Enspire training module, but I immediately thought of the LucasArts adventure games of my youth). Anyways, just I drew the word freedom, I realized it was pointing at the traffic:

What’s maddening about traffic? The lack of freedom! What gives the illusion of freedom? Weaving in and out of traffic—moving through space—while still following a linear path!

Behold, the power of mindmapping and visual thinking! The connections otherwise not made!

Other subjects touched on that merit further reading:

• Ensō
• Simonides
• constructivism